Texas People, Texas Places

More Musings of the Rambling Boy

Lonn Taylor

Publication Year: 2014

Following up Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy with a second collection of essays, Lonn Taylor’s Texas People, Texas Places again explores the very best of Texas geography, Texas history, and Texas personalities. In a state so famous for its pride, Taylor manages to write an exceptionally honest, witty, and wise book about Texas past and Texas present.

Texas People, Texas Places is a story of men and women and places that have made this state great. From a small-town radio host to tight-fisted West Texas ranchers, and even to Taylor’s own family members, Taylor’s subjects paint a profound and dynamic picture.

Lonn Taylor shares anecdotes that will appeal to any Texan, in a voice that is as personal as it is unique.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Foreword

In far west texas, where Lonn
Taylor lives, there’s a saying that
if you ask someone a question, they’ll tell you a story. And out
there, no one tells stories quite like Lonn. That’s no brag, just fact....

Introduction

I have always been attracted
to eccentric people and small
towns. In high school my best friends were not the athletes or the
beauty queens but the shy girls who wanted to be artists and the
quiet boys who played chess. As an undergraduate, even though I
majored in history and government, I hung around with theater...

I. Texas People

1. Travels With My Father

I cannot go on a long road trip
without thinking about my
father. He was a highway engineer, a member of the first civil engineering
class to graduate from Texas A&M that studied highway
construction rather than railroad construction. That was in 1924.
He went on to have a long career with the US Bureau of Public...

2. Uncle Kit the Drifter

There is a sentimental ballad
from the 1870s called “The
Little Rosewood Casket,” about a dying woman who wants a package
of old love letters read to her. The chorus goes: In a little rosewood
casket / Sitting on a marble stand / There’s a packet of old letters
/ Written by a cherished hand. I opened a packet of old letters
the other day. They were not in a rosewood casket and they are not...

3. A Love Story

The plymouth colony had
Priscilla Mullins and John
Alden (“Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”) and Jamestown
had Pocahontas and John Smith, even though Pocahontas married
someone else and went to England and had her portrait painted
wearing a funny neck ruff, but Texas has no great love story among...

4. Figgi

Two weeks ago I drove to
San Antonio to say goodbye to
my friend Figgi Rosengren, whose memorial service was held on
May 5. Figgi was eighty-three when he died, and he led the fullest
of lives, but his death diminished the lives of everyone who knew
him because being around him was so much fun....

5. Rachel on the Radio

Rachel Osier Lindley
introduced me to Frankie
“Half-Pint” Jaxon and His Quarts of Joy and changed my life, or at
least the Wednesday evening portion of it. Lindley hosts a radio
program called Old Timey on KRTS, the public radio station in
Marfa, every Wednesday night from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. I have started...

6. The Lady Librarians

My friend Michael Baskin
from Denver was in town
not long ago and dropped by our house to visit. Mike is a lawyer
and a bibliophile. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas
at Austin, he worked for Miss Katherine Blow in the Humanities
Reference Library, so it was natural that our talk turned to the...

7. Amelia Williams, Cotton Farmer and Scholar

Last weekend I had a brush
with the past—my own family’s
past and Texas’s past, too. My wife and I drove over to Cameron, a
county-seat town northeast of Austin, for a ceremony honoring
Amelia Williams. It seems that a local foundation in Cameron, the
Yoe Foundation, selects half a dozen or so distinguished natives of...

8. Thoroughly Modern Mojella

Mojella Moore of Alpine
is a cosmopolitan, sophisticated,
and beautiful woman of eighty-one who lives in a ten-room,
ranch-style house north of town. Her living room has wall-to-wall
carpeting and is furnished with comfortable easy chairs, couches,
and a flat-screen television set. Her ample kitchen is equipped...

9. Frugality Was a Virtue

Most of the first generation
of big West Texas
ranchers, the ones who built the mansions that lined Summit
Avenue in Fort Worth when I was growing up there, had gone
through the hard times that followed the Civil War. Many of them
were notoriously close with a dollar. My grandmother used to say
that some of them would skin a flea for the hide and tallow....

10. Apache Adams

Apache Adams is not a typical
Big Bend cowboy, but he
is the quintessential Big Bend Cowboy, having an excess of the
qualities that turn a good cowboy into a superlative one. He is a
fine horseman, a superb roper, and he has no back-down, to use
his own phrase (which he employs about someone else, not himself)....

11. Ted Gray

The big bend lost a unique
citizen when Ted Gray of
Alpine died on March 14 at the age of eighty-eight. Whenever a
person of Ted’s age and stature in the community dies, someone
will always step forward and say that the deceased was the last of
his breed. Plenty of people are saying that about Ted Gray. He was...

12. Carry Huffman and Joe Sitter, Border Lawmen

Not long ago, I spent a
morning at the Marfa Sector
Headquarters of the Border Patrol talking with Carry Huffman,
who is the Deputy Chief Patrol Agent there. On the surface,
Huffman (who pronounces his first name KO-ree) would appear
to be the ultimate modern law-enforcement officer. He has been...

13. Two Viejos at a Kitchen Table

I spent a Friday morning a
couple of weeks ago doing what
I enjoy almost more than anything and don’t get to do often
enough. I sat at a kitchen table in Marfa with a couple of gentlemen
in their eighties drinking coffee and listening to them trade
stories. Jack Brunson and Doc Whitman have been friends for...

14. Alan Tennant and the Rattlesnakes

There are no rattlesnakes in
England, so when the first
English colonists came to North America rattlers made a big
impression on them. One of the oldest American ballads is a song
called “Springfield Mountain,” written in the 1760s about a young
man who is fatally bitten by a rattlesnake while mowing a meadow....

15. Colonel Crimmins, the Rattlesnake Venom Man

In July 1926 a young man
named Jesús Ramirez and a
friend were walking down the highway from Asherton, Texas, to
Eagle Pass, hoping to find work in the border town. The two men
stopped to rest for a minute, and Ramirez was bitten on the arm by
a rattlesnake. His companion flagged down a car and they were...

16. Two Governors for the Price of One

Not long ago, my wife
and I were in Austin and
decided to have dinner in the dining room of the Driskill Hotel, an
Austin landmark since its opening in the 1880s. The dining room
is hung with portraits of famous Texans, and when the twentysomething-
year-old hostess directed us to a table under a portrait...

17. Pappy and the Light Crust Doughboys

The other day Michael
Baskin, who knows that I like
such things, dropped by the house to bring me a campaign card
extolling the virtues of W. Lee O’Daniel, a former Texas governor
who was running for reelection to the United States Senate when
the card was printed in 1942. I was delighted to have it. Not only...

18. The Two Garcias

Two Texans named Garcia
led the fight to end discrimination
against Mexican Americans in Texas in the years after World
War II. One of them received the Medal of Freedom from
President Ronald Reagan and is honored by a nine-foot-high statue
in Corpus Christi. The other died an alcoholic in the San...

19. The Lark of the Border

One of my Christmas gifts
from my wife this year was a
small retablo dedicated to the Mexican American singer Lydia
Mendoza. It is a decorated wooden shadow box, painted pink and
Virgin Mary blue, surmounted by a cross and containing a tinted
photograph of a very young Lydia Mendoza holding a twelve-string...

20. Albert Alvarez, Secret Historian

I sometimes write about
the secret history of the Big Bend
and the people who have recorded it. By secret history, I mean the
history of the Spanish-speaking people of the region, which has
been omitted from most published histories of the Big Bend....

21. Mary Bonkemeyer and the Grits Trees

Not long ago at a party in
Marfa, I heard a woman
behind me say, in a broad Southern accent, “When I was in college
there were some very gullible Northern girls who wanted to
know about the South, so I told them that I had grown up on my
father’s grits plantation, and that every morning my job was to take...

22. Gene Miller, Ranch Wife

For Gene Miller, the hardest
years of her life as a ranch
wife were the years she had to live in town. Gene, who is my neighbor
in Fort Davis, grew up as a city girl in Vancouver, British
Columbia. She met her husband, Fort Davis cowboy Roe Miller,
during World War II. He was a US Navy flier, stationed at...

23. Russell Lee, Photographer

Some time back I wrote
about two New Deal agencies,
the WPA and the CCC, that left a lasting mark on the Texas landscape.
There was a third agency, the Farm Security Administration,
that also left a legacy in Texas, but it was a legacy of photographs
rather than buildings. The FSA, which was created in 1935 as the...

24. Bill Leftwich, Artist

Last week nearly two hundred
of Bill Leftwich’s friends
gathered at St. Joseph’s parish hall in Fort Davis to pay a final tribute
to him. Bill, who died in Fort Worth on April 27, was not a
Catholic, but the parish hall was the only building in town that
could hold the number of people who wanted to be there. One of...

25. The Propeller Man of Marfa

We all know that Marfa is
a center for the visual arts
and that people come from all over the world to see the minimalist
installations at the Chinati Foundation. Most of us know that
several important films have been shot in Marfa, starting with
Giant in 1954. Many people are aware that Marfa is a gliding and...

26. Small-Town Journalists

The death in December of
former Pecos journalist Oscar
Griffin Jr. reminded me once more of the importance of freedom
of the press in this country, and the American tradition of smalltown
newspaper editors and reporters standing up for what is right
in the face of community pressure to sit down and shut up....

27. Lee Bennett and Marfa's History

In Japan, they declare people
with special talents national
treasures. If we did that in the Big Bend, my first nominee would
be Lee Bennett of Marfa. I first heard of Bennett when I worked
for the Texas State Historical Association in the 1960s. The
Association ran a program for high school students called the
Junior Historians, and the director of that program was Ken...

28. Jack Jackson Rewrites Texas History

Have you ever wondered
why every Texan over forty
knows the details of the Texas Revolution by heart, and can tell
you at the drop of a hat about the cannon at Gonzales, the Goliad
massacre, Travis and the line in the sand at the Alamo, the Mier
prisoners and the drawing of the black beans and the white beans,...

29. Myrrl McBride, Prisoner of War

This Saturday, April 9,
will be the sixty-ninth anniversary
of the fall of Bataan. The names of Bataan and the island
fortress of Corregidor are fading from memory now, in the same
way that the names of the World War I battles of the Meuse-
Argonne and Belleau Wood had lost their power by the time my...

30. Some Texas Confederates

The civil war is a watershed
event in American history, one
that still resonates with us. My generation is the last generation
that will have known people who knew people who fought in it. I
come from a Southern family. Three of my four great-grandfathers
were in the Confederate army and the fourth was on his way from...

31. The Jacksons of Blue and Other Texas Chairmakers

Back when I watched television
my favorite program was
Antiques Roadshow. It gave me a delicious sense of Schadenfreude—
pleasure in the misfortunes of others—when the appraiser,
a suave, supercilious Sotheby’s type, would say to some grandmotherly
lady who had brought in an old cane-bottomed chair,...

32. A Bunch of Cowboys Trying to Build an Airplane

I had a visit the other day
from Lionel Sosa of San Antonio
and his wife, Kathy. Sosa is a highly successful businessman, a
partner in the largest Hispanic advertising agency in the United
States, a consultant to presidential candidates, and an accomplished
portrait artist. But that is not what this column is about....

33. Amon Carter and Fort Worth

A recent visit to Fort Worth
made me realize once again
how much I love that city, my father’s hometown and mine, too.
Much of what I love about Fort Worth has to do with Amon Carter.
On this trip we visited one of his legacies, the Amon Carter
Museum of American Art, dedicated in 1961, six years after his...

II. Texas Places

34. Dark Corner and High Hill

I probably owe my affection
for country cemeteries to my
grandmother Taylor, who could not pass one without stopping.
When I was a small boy she would take me on drives in her
Studebaker Commander along the country roads around Fort
Worth, and whenever a cemetery would come in view she would...

35. County Courthouses

Probably because I grew up
in Fort Worth, county courthouses
have always fascinated me. In fact, I will admit to being a
courthouse freak; I will drive miles out of the way to see a really
good courthouse. Fort Worth does not have just a good courthouse;
it has a superb one, a vast red granite pile topped by a two...

36. Snooping Around Historic Houses

I have always been a fan of
historic houses, perhaps because
I am a born snoop. It is very difficult for me to pass a sign that says
“Historic Smedley Jones House, 1840” without stopping to see
what kind of stuff the Smedley Joneses had. There are about five
thousand historic houses in the United States and sometimes I feel
as though I have been in at least half of them....

37. Juneteenth Belongs to Texas

Last month I was rambling
around the Hill Country, working
on a research project that has occupied most of my spring and
summer, and stopped for breakfast at the Bowling Alley Café on
the square in Blanco, a small town on US 281 between Johnson
City and San Antonio. Taped to the door of the café was a handbill...

38. Christmas in Anson

There are two poems that
every Texan of my parents’
generation knew by heart and would recite at the drop of a hat.
They are Frank Deprez’s “Lasca” and Larry Chittenden’s “The
Cowboys’ Christmas Ball.” Not long ago I ran into Chuck Finsley,
retired curator of paleontology at the Dallas Museum of Science,...

39. There Was Nothing for Us to Do But Run

The green, rolling, oakstudded
country between the
Colorado and Brazos Rivers below Austin and Waco is one of the
most beautiful parts of Texas, but in the wet spring of 1836 it was
the setting for some of the darkest days in Texas history. During the
weeks between March 6 of that year, when the Alamo fell, and
April 21, when Santa Anna was defeated at San Jacinto, the...

40. San Antonio's Cement Sculpture

Visitors to San Antonio
sometimes comment on a
peculiar bus stop shelter on Broadway just north of its intersection
with Hildebrand, in front of one of the gates to the campus of
Immaculate Word University. At first glance it looks like something
out of a Mexican jungle, a thatched roof supported by three...

41. The Flying Boat on Medina Lake

The new year always makes
me think of Aggie Pate and his
calendars. A. M. “Aggie” Pate Jr. was a Fort Worth businessman
who had an interest in the history of transportation and in the
1960s founded the Pate Museum of Transportation, a collection of
automobiles, helicopters, airplanes, and even a homemade submarine.
Pate had a healthy ego. For a number of years his company,...

42. Dance Halls and Honky Tonks

I spent a recent weekend at a
symposium on the preservation
of Texas dance halls, held at the James Dick Festival Institute in
Round Top, Texas, and cosponsored by Texas Dance Hall
Preservation, Inc. I learned a lot. I learned, for instance, that it is
hard to distinguish what is a dance hall and what is not. If you
made a graph of dance halls as a series of concentric circles, there...

43. Fidel in Wharton

Fidel Castro has made two
trips to Texas. On the first, he
went away with money; on the second, with a horse. The second
visit was the longest and most public, and it won Fidel the temporary
good will of a covey of wealthy Houston businessmen. It was
part of a two-week trip that the Cuban premier made to the United
States in April 1959, just three months after his revolutionary army...

44. Adventures in Albany

Several weeks ago I went
to Albany to speak to the annual
Chamber of Commerce dinner there. I do not mean Albany, the
capital of the state of New York, but Albany, the county seat of
Shackleford County, Texas, a town of two thousand people about
thirty miles northeast of Abilene. I went there at the invitation of...

45. The West Texas Town of El Paso

In the summer of 1879, a
forty-six-year-old ex-Confederate
colonel named George Wythe Baylor started out from San
Antonio on horseback to take a new job in El Paso. The job, which
paid $75 a month, was a lieutenancy in the Texas Rangers. Baylor
later wrote that as he had a family and “had been about two years
on scant rations and no pay,” he was glad to get it....

46. Bryan Woolley's Wonderful Room

I cannot remember exactly
when I first encountered Bryan
Woolley’s writing. I do remember that when I was working for the
Dallas Historical Society in the late 1970s he was on the staff of the
Dallas Times Herald, and that we met once or twice. I moved away
from Texas in 1979, and a few years later Woolley moved over to...

47. Austin 1962, Fort Davis 2011

During the summer of
1962, I lived in a small garage
apartment behind a big house on Nueces Street in Austin. I was
ostensibly taking a crash course in German at the University of
Texas so that I could pass the German translation exam then
required of all PhD candidates. My next-door neighbors up the
alley were a group of people my age who inhabited a much larger...

48. A Killing in the Big Bend

Old troubles in the Big
Bend are like the pearl in the
oyster. The simple fact of a man’s being killed in a dispute is the
irritating grain of sand; then layers of narrative build up around it
until the story is a polished pearl, handed down from generation to
generation as a community treasure, even though it has its beginning
in tragedy....

49. Marfa's Fort D. A. Russell

A few miles south of
Washington, DC, on the
Maryland side of the Potomac River, is an imposing stone fortress
called Fort Washington. It was built in 1824 so that the British fleet
could never again sail up the Potomac and menace the national
capital, as it had in 1814 when the British burned the city. Its construction
was a classic case of locking the stable after the horse is
gone....

50. The Ronquillo Grant

Some aspects of Texas history
can best be understood in terms
of the deeply rooted human tendency to believe that all land
acquired cheaply will inevitably increase in value. Nothing so well
illustrates this as the story of the Ronquillo Grant, a chimera that
shimmered over a large portion of the Big Bend for fifty years,
enriching several middlemen and, in the end, leaving a Chicago
millionaire nearly five million dollars poorer....

51. The Food Shark

Twenty-five years ago
the Irish novelist Roddy Doyle
published a hilarious book called The Van about the misadventures
of three working-class Dubliners who purchase an old van
and try to sell fish and chips from it. In Doyle’s novel, everything
goes wrong that possibly can, and the entrepreneurs end up driving...

52. The Highland Hereford Rough Riders

Every American has heard
of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough
Riders, the volunteer cavalry unit that Roosevelt and Colonel
Leonard Wood took to Cuba in the Spanish-American War, but
how many people have heard of the Highland Hereford Rough
Riders? I certainly had not, until I started reading old issues of the
Big Bend Sentinel in the Marfa Public Library in connection with...

53. The Road to the Mine

Historians use many gateways
to enter the past. Some
study treaties and diplomatic history; some wars and military history;
some, agriculture and trade and the evolution of settlement.
Some even study the development of roads and highways. This
past month I joined that last group and spent a good deal of time
in the Marfa courthouse looking into the history of roads in...

54. The Secret History of the Big Bend

The Big Bend has two histories.
There is the official history,
enshrined in books like Carlysle Gram Raht’s Romance of the
Davis Mountains and Big Bend Country; Clifford Casey’s Mirages,
Mysteries, and Reality: Brewster County, Texas; Ron Tyler’s The
Big Bend: A History of the Last Texas Frontier, and Cecilia
Thompson’s two-volume History of Marfa and Presidio County,
which has just been reprinted and of which a third volume is in...

55. Tony Cano's Marfa

Several weeks ago I wrote a
column about the Big Bend’s
secret history, the story of the Spanish-speaking communities here,
and I mentioned a couple of recent books that threw some light on
the history. Now Tim Johnson of the Marfa Book Company has
called my attention to a third book, Tony Cano’s autobiographical...

56. The Sandia Springs Wetlands

In the fall of 2010, Ellen
Weinacht of Balmorhea went on
a birding trip with some friends to the Bosque del Apache National
Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. As she was watching hundreds of
sandhill cranes feeding in the wetlands along the Rio Grande, she
thought, “I want a place like this at home.” Now she has one. It is
called the Sandia Springs Wetlands, and I spent a day last week visiting...

57. After the Fire

I am hesitant to write about
the fire that swept through Fort
Davis the evening of April 9, destroying twenty-four homes,
because I was not even there when it hit. My wife and I were
returning from a trip to New Mexico that Saturday, and we were
stopped at a roadblock in Balmorhea. A state trooper told us that
we could not go to Fort Davis because the town had been...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.